A chat with Wayne Murray, Strategy Director at Audience and Trustee at Martlets Hospice, Brighton. We chat about organisational and funding strategy post Covid-19. Wayne wanted to chat about horses a lot, but we also covered a range of topics related to the brief, including:
- What has changed during Covid-19
- How the fundraising model has changed and the need for transformational change
- The great ways of working that we’d like to see the sector keep after Covid-19
- Who nailed their fundraising and communications recently. With nods to *that* RNLI video, Age UK and Refuge.
Key highlights for me:
- In relation to fundraising during the crisis, the charities that have been able to scale quickly, have been the ones doing really well. Cutting through internal challenges and not having to wait three weeks for a leadership team meeting to gain approval is really important. Hopefully this is a cultural shift that charities doing it well at the moment will be able to keep.
- Connecting with people on more personal level. For me, people across the sector being more open, available to chat and ultimately supporting each other during the crisis has been a signature mark of lockdown. Not being within an organisation, this is something I’ve really valued as a freelancer. And within organisations, there’s been a blurring of hierarchies. If we’re honest, this has primarily been driven by necessity, but it is key to empowering individuals and teams to deliver and again, hopefully this will continue.
- Thinking of your organisation as a start-up. Wayne talks about an approach he takes in some workshops is to ask people what their organisation would look like if they were a start-up – i.e. if they got to start from scratch. It reminds me of getting lost on a walk in the Lake District a few years ago and asking someone for directions to a certain place and they responded, “well I wouldn’t start from here”. There’s clearly value in thinking about things as if you had a blank piece of paper and removing yourself – albeit temporarily – from the challenges you’re facing as a result of hierarchy, culture and structure.
Other than Wayne’s unrelenting equine metaphors, I really liked this quote: “mate, everything boils back to people and culture”. So true.
Thanks so much for listening.
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Beth Crackles 